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Month: March 2015

This is my first blog of the year as I finally start to recover from a pesky and painful illness which turned my thoughts to mush and kept me homebound for the first quarter of the year. I’m glad to be back in the land of the living!.

On my first trip into the City for a while I headed for lunch with the long suffering wife/nurse Gail and son Salvatore AKA patient No 2, who is also laid up after an operation on his shoulder. The first thing that struck me is the amount of new eateries recently opened in …read more

Fantastically fluffy and marvelously moist pancakes. That’s what you get when you add a luxuriously creamy element like mascarpone to your pancake batter. And lemon? Well, lemons are tangy and delicious. This makes for an elegant, perhaps even slightly elevated, variation to the usual Sunday morning pancakes. Also, it’s a great excuse to add mascarpone to your shopping list (unless you already buy it regularly. In which case your shopping list is, well, different to mine.)! And if that weren’t enough, we’re going to top it off with a divine berry compote.

Lemon Mascarpone Pancake Ingredients

Southern Utah is a magical place, filled with beautiful and majestic spots to explore. AJ and I have been there twice, in the summer of 2013 and the summer of 2014, trying to see as much as possible. We feel like we barely scratched the surface. Though there are gorgeous National Parks in Utah, one of my favorite (and easiest) hikes that we went on was the Willis Creek Slot Canyon hike. Nestled in the Grand Staircase-Ecalante National Monument area, the Willis Creek Slot Canyon is one of several slot canyons in the area, some more difficult to navigate than …read more

Built around the vestiges of two 1860s woodcutters’ cottages, O&B’s Auberge du Pommier has been open since 1987. Located in uptown Toronto, a few minutes walk from York Mills subway station, Auberge du Pommier has the most picturesque entrance to a restaurant that I’ve seen in a long time.

Delayed by the TTC, I was the last to arrive – I see my friends waiting for me in the foyer. Everyone is in great spirits, and Finance Bro tells me that I’ve made it right in time. The hostess takes my coat, and guides us to our table in …read more

Hello friends and fellow readers! I’ve casually mentioned that I’m working on a cookbook called Marbled, Swirled and Layered for the past year and the time has come for me to ask if you any of you all would be willing to help me out? I need recipe testers for the cookbook and I would love if you all could try out my recipes to makes sure they work in all kitchens. There’s only so many times I can make a recipe in my kitchen to …read more

This is a recipe for lovers of chocolate. Wait, no. This is a recipe for lazy lovers of chocolate. Or maybe a hard-working lover, who doesn’t have as much time as they’d like to prepare a Chocolate Pie from scratch. Okay, this is for anyone who wants to make a Chocolate Pie but doesn’t have the time or the energy to go all out.

Happy Pi(e) Day!

March 14th. 3.14. Get it? Good. Now you’re a nerd too. Finally, we’re in this together. And that means you have to keep my secrets, right?

By Hedonia Photo: Edible Excursions For the most part, Mexican food in San Francisco is associated with our signature burrito, a fat slab filled with beans, rice, meat and potentially more, easily weighing in at a pound or more. Everyone has their favorite taqueria, and disagreements over which is superior can get heated indeed. I like an SF burrito as much as the next guy, but I think we need to be honest: It’s not Mexican food. It’s San Francisco food. When I worked in Redwood City, a colleague told me…

Everyone needs a good chocolate chip cookie recipe. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about some fancy, new age chocolate-cronut-chip-cruller-cookie thing (though that does sound interesting, at the very least!). I’m talking about a good ol’ fashioned chocolate chip cookie. Easy to make. No crazy ingredients required. Loved by everyone.

This recipe doesn’t take long, is easy to follow, and makes some delicious, “crisp-on-the-outside but chewy-on-the-inside” chocolate chip cookies.

Believe it or not, until recently I had only baked chocolate chip cookies a handful of times. I generally settled for dry, crunchy store-bought cookies that provided, at best, a mildly pleasant …read more

By Hedonia Photo: Alanna Hale Japanese cuisine is perhaps my favorite, or at least certainly in my top three. If I were stranded on a desert island, I’d be just fine so long as there was ample seafood, rice paddies, and someone to turn it all into perfect sushi every day. Hands down our favorite sushi place in the city is ICHI Sushi, and its izakaya bar, NI, in the back. We’ve been fans since their early days, occupying a tiny and fairly charmless space that housed our previous favorite, Yo’s Sushi Club,…

My partner AJ and I love to visit Los Angeles as often as possible. We have some great friends down there which we adore and try to see at least two or three times a year. But the biggest draw for us (sorry friends) is the food! Japanese ramen, though SF’s ramen scene is finally getting better, Thai food which SF is still lagging behind but catching up and Korean food. Korean food in particular is …read more